Winnie The Pooh Bank

'She knew what she wanted'

It was 1986 and a cast of teenage actors with the Children's Theatre of Charlotte was rehearsing for a production of "Godspell."

"Wouldn't it be nice if we had a flute?" someone asked.

"I play the flute!" piped up Kristen Anderson, one of the young actors. With her typical high-energy, problem-solving attitude, she pulled a flute out of a bag and started to play.

It's a moment Charlotte director Kevin Campbell fondly recalls. He says he could see way back then that the young artist had the skills and the ambition to succeed.

And she did. Most recently, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, 39, co-wrote songs for Disney's version of "Winnie the Pooh" with her Tony Award-winning husband, Robert Lopez. And she plays the voice of Kanga, mother of Roo.

For Anderson-Lopez, her art comes easily. She says the creative process is like being 5 years old and going to someone's house and saying, "What do you want to play?"

She and Lopez also adapted "Finding Nemo" into a musical theater production. It opened in 2007 and runs five days a week at Disney World.

"For a lot of kids, it's their first exposure to theater," she said. "You really have to cultivate a love for this art form."

Anderson-Lopez is the daughter of John and Erin Anderson of Waxhaw. John Anderson, a freelance columnist for the Charlotte Observer's Union News, saw his daughter's love for the theater bloom early.

When he took 4-year-old Kristen to her first play, "Her eyes were focused on the stage - they didn't twitch," he said. "She knew that's what she wanted to do."

In 1986, 14-year-old Kristen moved with her family from Westchester, N.Y., to Charlotte's Myers Park neighborhood. She enrolled at Charlotte Country Day, where she was seen as a "very strange, enthusiastic New Yorker."

Her family life was chaotic at the time - her mother had just given birth to twin girls.

Kristen threw herself into musical productions at the Children's Theatre of Charlotte.

She made her boyfriend blast Phantom of the Opera in his Jeep convertible.

"When most kids were listening to R.E.M., I was listening to Sondheim," she said.

She sang, danced, and acted, but her love of writing was constantly brewing.It has already changed a school production of "My Fair Lady", so that everyone had a speaking role.

After high school, Charlotte Anderson-Lopez left double major in drama and psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts. After graduating in 1994 as the elected President of class, she was offered a job in investment banking. The penny of his parents, Anderson-Lopez went to New York for the interview. But when she saw a magazine display for a musical theater audition, she jumped at the interview.

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